Delusions on the Left and Labour Right

 

I had it with writing about internal Labour party politics at the end of the 2010s, and have written very little on the subject since. Writing about issues where there are clear tribes or factions with a fairly rigid belief system, but reality is not how either tribe sees it, is too much of a mugs game, or perhaps just involves too much self harm.

Let me be more specific. In the summer of 2019 I was writing a regular monthly article for the online New Statesman. Within hours of publishing my latest piece, where I suggested Corbyn would do less harm as Prime Minister than Boris Johnson, they withdrew it. I was told I could continue writing for them only if I stuck to economics and did not mention to anyone what they had just done. I didn’t accept the latter condition, and have never been invited to write for them again. It meant I briefly felt I was doing the right thing and in reality the potential audience for my writing shrank.

However, I think it’s very hard to understand what is currently happening in the UK right now without saying something about internal Labour party politics. What I learnt from the 2015-2020 experience, and what I should have already known from earlier events, especially what happened after 1979, is that the following proposition is probably true.

Proposition:

The Labour Party only works if it is a broad church that spans left to right, but only if the left does not have control.

Labour works best when it’s a broad church for at least three reasons. The first is that Labour’s right needs the left to at the very least critique its own ideas, and more generally to provide ideas and some vision. As Steve Richards writes, the current government is desperately lacking a political vision, and is even failing to point out the failures of the visions of other political parties (e.g. privatisation). The second is that the left can provide a much needed moral compass, as the Labour’s governments complicity in what many believe is genocide in Gaza clearly shows, and what a Labour government treating as terrorists civil disobedience groups who had become annoying (in part because of the habit of juries not to convict them) also shows. The third is that the left represents the views of a sizable proportion of the population, and it is better having that in the tent than outside it.

However, while it is essential for the left to be part of the Labour party, it is also crucial that it never controls that party. To many who are not on the political left this may seem obvious. You just need to mention Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader, after all. But this is partly because the mainstream media treats ideas and many individuals on the left as ‘beyond the political pale’ while simultaneously treating ideas from the far right as worthy of discussion or even mainstream.

My own reasons for believing this part of the proposition are two-fold. First the Labour right will not tolerate the left controlling the party, and would rather sabotage the party than allow the left to control it. As they have demonstrated in more than one recent historical period they can be very effective at that. Second, Labour led from the left will never win power in today’s UK except by accident, because the forces against it are too strong (see also below). In both cases those facts may be regrettable, but they are nevertheless real. Many on the left believe it is better for the Labour party to be pure than to be in power, but I don’t.

As I have already mentioned, some on the right of the party were prepared to see Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and for us to leave the European Union rather than help Labour under Corbyn against the Tories under Johnson. Given how disastrous Johnson as PM was [1], you have to be pretty outrageous in your beliefs about what a Labour government after 2019 would have done to support that sabotage. Labour under Corbyn, for example, would not have adopted a policy of herd immunity for the Covid virus. How many unnecessary deaths were a price worth paying to prevent Corbyn becoming Prime Minister? [2]

I’m occasionally reminded that some on the left have never forgiven me for not backing Corbyn in 2016. The left can be as tribal as the right. In 2015 it was not obvious to me just how far the Labour right were prepared to go in undermining the left’s leadership, and by 2016 it was also clear that Corbyn himself did not have the skills nor perhaps inclination to be as inclusive as possible. But I also wonder what would have happened if he had tried? Would the right have still sabotaged his attempts at unity? But although Corbyn was not my choice, I have always been clear that a Labour victory in 2017 and 2019 would be far preferable to what we actually got. 

Since Starmer took over as leader, the right of the party has taken charge, and seems to have decided that Labour would be better off without the left. Left candidates have been purged, and rebel MPs have lost the party whip despite Labour having a huge majority. It was first portrayed as a necessary move to restore the voters trust in Labour, and to make it clear to voters that it was now Starmer’s party not Corbyn’s. But the fact that the party is continuing in the same manner now it is in government suggests it was never just that. The right that now runs things seems to act as if it believes Labour would be better off without the left, and it has partly achieved that wish.

This was and continues to be delusional. The best argument they have is that, come the next general election, anyone sensible on the left has nowhere else to go besides voting tactically against the populist right. The battle at the next election will be between Labour and a probably united Conservative/Reform populist grouping, and victory for the latter would be as disastrous for the UK as Trump’s victory over Harris is proving disastrous for the US. I have no time for those on the left who suggest there is no difference between Starmer and Farage/Jenrick, because such arguments are factually wrong in ways that affect many people’s lives..

The reason why this argument from the Labour right is delusional is that many on the left will not vote tactically when it comes to general elections. Tactical voting is widespread but far from universal. The Labour right has now achieved what I suspect it intended. There is going to be a new left wing party, possibly co-operating with the Greens. Labour will undoubtedly lose seats as a result of attempting to purge the left from the Labour parliamentary party and more widely.

In addition, those on the left who would vote tactically in a General Election may understandably not vote tactically in local government elections beforehand. That will condemn the government to a long period of continuous electoral failure, with commentators taking it for granted that Farage is PM in waiting, and it is difficult to know what damage that will do.

One of the reasons the ‘they have nowhere else to go’ argument just doesn’t work for the left is that many on the left find it very hard to, as they see it, vote for a party that does so many things they regard is immoral on the tactical grounds that doing so might nevertheless make the world a better place. For example there was a real opportunity at the last election to consign the Conservatives to third place, making the Liberal Democrats the official opposition, which could have changed the nature of political debate in the UK. It required tactical voting even though Labour were going to win big. But instead some on the left decided that they could vote Green to (hilariously) ‘send a message to Labour’. It was an excuse to do what they wanted to do, and therefore a missed opportunity.

The Labour right is delusional because the left also has the power to help put Farage/Jenrick in power. They can sabotage Labour, not in the same way as the right did when Corbyn was leader but to the same effect. They can help us get a Trump type government in the UK [3]. One of the delusions of Labour’s right is that Labour becomes more electable by disposing of the left, when the reality is the opposite.

As well as delusions about each other, both the Labour right currently in power and many on the left carry delusions about the emergence of right wing populism and what to do about it.

The key delusion of the Labour right, which I have talked about many times, is that right wing populism is best fought by aping its policies and rhetoric. Right wing populism is about stressing differences between people where there often is little difference at all, denying humanity to the ‘other’, and presenting the other as a threat when they are not. You see that view pushed in the right wing press every day. It is a colossal deflection from society’s real problems, often designed to enhance elements of an existing plutocracy. By repeating the right wing populist rhetoric you just confirm rather than challenge this world view. 

One of the delusions of many on the left is not to recognise the shift in UK politics that has occurred over the last few decades. It is a shift which means that, under a FPTP voting system, the left has no chance of gaining power. General elections are now fought between social conservatives and social liberals, rather than between left and right on economic issues. I discuss the reasons for that here and here, and why the demographic trends that led to it are not going to be reversed any time soon here.

This means that social conservatives, and therefore potentially a combined Reform/Conservative ticket, have a natural majority in general elections, just as Brexit did in 2019. It is social liberals who are the new silent majority, who don’t hear their point of view expressed by the major political parties and who are ignored by much of the media (in part because the very right wing populist Conservative party remains the official opposition). It will mean that right wing populism is an ever present threat, and the best its opponents can do is unite against it.

So many on the left fail to see this, in part because they find it hard to stop seeing neoliberalism as their main enemy. As Eagleton notes here, according to some on the left right wing populism represents the death of neoliberalism, while according to others it is hyper neoliberalism. Eagleton gets it half right when he says that right wing populism prioritises the nation state. That can interfere with parts of neoliberalism while not messing with other aspects of it. But right wing populism also negates national unity by prioritising one part of that nation (e.g. ‘real Americans’) against the rest. It is by definition a divisive project, setting one part of the nation against other parts. It is divide in order to rule.

While many on the left wish that voters would regain their class consciousness, the politics of the moment is whether socially liberal values that have made so much progress in societies over the last fifty or so years are to survive or will be cut back with growing social conservatism. Palestinians are being killed in huge numbers every day not because neoliberalism requires it, but because Israel has a right wing populist government that encourages the denial of humanity to Palestinians in the eyes of so many Israelis.

Of course the left is socially liberal, in some cases more genuinely so than many more centrists who call themselves liberal. But what many on the left find difficult to accept is that the struggle now requires them ultimately to make common cause with more centrist social liberals. While every attempt should be made to get a Labour government to pursue more socially liberal and less authoritarian policies, it has also to be recognised that Labour are never going to abandon trying to attract socially conservative voters, because only by attracting those voters can it stop the election of a right wing populist government.

We had five years of UK economic and political decline, as well as a leader during the pandemic who worried more about what the right wing press thought than the advice coming from scientists, in part because the Labour right prioritised regaining the party over the health of the country. [4] Are we to see a Trump type regime in the UK because the Labour right think its clever to expel the left and ape Reform, and because many on the left refuse to accept that the only alternative to a Labour government is a Trump style regime in the UK?

[1] While it was certain that Johnson would take the UK out of the EU and do the UK serious economic damage as a result, if we had left under Corbyn it would have been on better terms and it wasn’t certain we would leave at all.

[2] Yes, I know that is only something we can ask in retrospect, but we can ask it nevertheless. Equally even a united Labour party would probably have lost in 2019, in part because of mistakes made by its leadership, but that is not a good reason for wishing it to happen. 

[3] The idea that the new left party might attract some potenial Reform voters doesn't seem to show up in polls, so far at least.

[4] A rationalisation for doing this, which I discuss in my posts on tactical voting, is that this represents a short term sacrifice for the greater long term good. But when you spell out this calculus it rarely adds up. For example the short term costs, like leaving the EU's single market and customs union, look pretty long lasting right now and the damage that has caused is also clear.